Reddit mentions of An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique (COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE)

I cannot more strongly recommend Steven W. Smith's The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing.

Every chapter is freely available as a PDF on the website.

Everyone who is interested in EEG/ECoG/LFP/single-unit research should absolutely read this book.

Steve Luck's Introduction to the Event Related Potential Technique is great, and will really help you to set up a top-quality ERP lab, but the DSP book really teaches you what happens to the signals you're recording.

If you want to get deeper into the underlying physiology of EEG, I'd recommend Electric Fields of the Brain by Nunez & Srinivasan.

You'd also be happy reading Buzsaki's Rhythms of the Brain.

I think the modern classic on ERPs is considered to be Steve Luck's book. I can vouch that it's an excellent book.

I can't help you with non-event-related EEG, though.

EEG analysis is a bit of an art form and mastering it just comes with experience, trial and error, and really knowing your particular dataset and aims. I use Matlab with the EEGLAB toolbox for ERPs and FieldTrip for time frequency analysis.

There are so many different steps, it's definitely not just a matter of pushing a button and getting a nice p-value out at the other side. I'd recommend getting your hands on this book in the first instance.

I'm not sure about single-cell recordings but with EEG experiments (and most other electrophysiological measures i.e. EOG, EMG) the voltage (also known as electrical potential difference) recorded at a place on the scalp is measure of the potential for current to move from one place to another. So you need 2 electrodes to measure this: the one (or more) on the scalp, and the ground electrode which provides a common reference point for all the other electrodes.
As far as I recall the site for this can vary, I know the EEG system we use (Biosemi) has two electrodes that work as grounds that are placed on the scalp (they are slightly more complex than just ground electrodes though but don't ask me to explain how!).

In addition (and slightly confusingly) you have reference electrodes, which can be placed in a variety of places (earlobes, nose, mastoids, etc for EEG). The key property of a site for a reference electrode is that it must be unaffected by the source you are recording. It picks up all the internal and external noise and is then subtracted from the active electrodes to give a cleaner signal. Just like the normal electrodes the reference is measuring the potential difference between itself and the ground electrode.


Luck (2005) puts it like this: Signal = AG voltage - RG voltage

[A = Scalp electrode, R = Reference, & G = Ground electrode]


Hopefully that makes sense and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!

Source: I'm Cognitive Neuroscience PhD student, & Luck (2005) explains this pretty well.

Also this:
Stephen Luck's book

Yes, absolutely. http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Event-Related-Potential-Technique-Neuroscience/dp/0262621967

Methodology-wise, Steve Luck has a really nice, clear introductory text to ERP techniques.